24 Comments

Can these also change multipliers on K series? Usually the interesting question on these is can you build a cheap gaming OC setup with them for a moderate Haswell OC setup, like i5 4670K @ 4GHz... and a single GPU? Or you need to spend (sometimes a lot) more on motherboards to get there a pay for something you will probably never utilize? I am interested from this perspective on cheap/budget boards. :)Reply

Given the lack of comparison points I'm not sure a full review would provide us with an objective measure. How about a comparison of 2 or 3 H81 boards? (assuming you can get boards from other manufacturers and Gigabyte et al don't mind you doing a "round up" style review).

Some coverage of H81 would certainly be beneficial anyway... a quick look on reddit.com/r/buildapc and similar sites shows there are a lot of system builders on tight budgets and they tend to cut corners by building around boards such as this!Reply

I build PCs for the people around me. Most are adults, seniors or kids, and just went something run-of-mill, cheap (and small and quiet too thank you). This board is exactmly the type of board I'm buying blind several times a year because all review sites are run by geeks for geeks, and and don't cater at all to anyone outside of the 15-29 gamer/young adult demographics who want rooxorz buildz to overclock their watercooled multiGPU setups built with someone else's money. Oh, and flashy lights plizzzz :-pReply

I fully agree.I have zero interest in overclocking, RAID, SRT and whatever alphabet soup of useless technologies Intel bloats their chipsets with these days.

There's no need for the typical long detailed reviews we typically get here.Something that focuses on the quality differences between a bunch of low end boards would be ideal.The point would be to identify a set of products that are solidly engineered and safe to buy as opposed to ones that may have sacrificed reliability to get to a lower price point.Reply

Without doing builds and stability/performance testing an article won't really be any better than looking at specs on newegg; and even if you drop testing raid/etc you've still done most of the work involved in a review.Reply

Rather than a review, it would be nice to have a chart showing what companies offer what, and how it compares to other competitors. For example, relating Ultra Durable to something that Asus or ECS offers.

Would totally be interested in a review. Always interesting to see just how much you are gaining in performance for the extra money of the high end boards. Also where critical corners may have been cut.The extra features, I have often found, sound great but then I end up using them rarely if at all.Reply

A review would be worthwhile. It's always good to know what holes and failings cheaper boards may have. Obviously more expensive boards tend to just be 'better', but it what ways? There are lots of builders that could get by with something like H81 but shy away due to some inherent and unquantifiable inferiority that must exist since it isn't as feature-rich as costlier offerings.Reply

I'm mildly surprised they went with that one for the headline picture; but with fewer USB ports available, no digital audio, esata, firewire, or digital audio to use up back panel space there's room for them and the controller for LPT/RS232 is part of the same chip as the PS2 port so it's cheap to add to a few models (although I'm not sure why they did on several). End users of the legacy ports will be mostly commercial/industrial/scientific customers because when the device being controlled costs $10k to $10m replacing it when it's PC interface goes out of style isn't an option.Reply

With Intel exiting the motherboard market, this level of product is very much in need of reviews. Intel motherboards with entry level chipsets have been the bread and butter of business desktops, so we need to know what to use from here on out.Reply

I'd like more info on these types of boards. Like what everyone else is saying, it's good to know <b>why</b> these are cheaper. However, a typical review won't be able to fully achieve such a request. I'd like some sort of long term testing which is not possible for review units.

Do these "cheap" boards fail more often? Do BIOS updates stop earlier than the higher end boards? Are these tested against major Linux distros (ie. Redhat, SUSE, etc.)? Are these boards more buggy?Reply

I'd love to see reviews concentrating on low-end/budget motherboards like AM3 760G, FM2 A55/A75, 1155 H81/B75 etc. Z87 reviews are fairly enjoyable, but I usually buy budget boards for friends/family computers. Frankly, budget boards tend to serve them very well. So the formal reference/comparison with regard to low-end vs high-end details like UEFI options, OC potential (One can still overclock AMD budget boards modestly), exclusive software differences, and VRM phase designs etc would do many AT readers good. I believe many people fall into this category. Just my 2 cents.Reply

I'm late to the party. Building on what ThomasS31 says, a simple set up with good audio and a single GPU, some moderate overclocking is what I'm looking for as well. Looking for a small set up for my kid who wants to do light gaming (Sims 3) and wants good audio for Pianoteq. So yes IAN, PLEASE DO a review. What would be EXTREMLY INTERESTING would be a comparison of the sound quality with ASUS Xonar, and play around with the op-ams.Reply